The litigation services market is comprised of various products and services used by legal professionals, before, during, and after litigation. Various research services allow a user to locate legal information, such as cases, pleadings, publications, and more, over the Internet. Such tools generally provide users, such as lawyers, legal staff, and other individuals, with a means to look up information that is helpful and often necessary for litigation-related activities.
Typically, a user chooses between various services or databases when searching for a particular piece of information. Each database can contain different information types. For example, while one database may contain all Federal Court decisions, another database contains legal periodicals. When the user seeks specific information, they must navigate to the appropriate service or database and search within that source for the needed information.
While existing litigation services are extremely helpful, room for improvement still exists. For example, if the user does not know which combination of services provide the needed information, the user may waste time and money navigating options or performing searches that do not return optimal results.
In some cases, the user may have to use multiple services to receive all the desired information, requiring the user to visit multiple locations or learn how to master several different search tools. Additionally, keeping track of the many services and their offerings can be a cumbersome undertaking. This is especially true in view of the constant evolution of litigation services and other sources of litigation information.
Accordingly, an object of the embodiments discussed herein is to provide systems and methods for profiled and focused searching of litigation information. Some embodiments allow a user to search for specific litigation information across several services based on the user's litigation task rather than the limitations of a particular source of the information, as follows.